It Finds Me

Sometimes it’s the space when I wake up. Or it’s the long walk home. Or it enters through the front door in the middle of the afternoon on the first warm day we have had. No matter when, it finds me, everyday. At some point I am taken out at the knees, brought down a level, left there to fend for myself and climb out inch by inch. It comes from nowhere. But still it comes.

This time is different. I am different. I have more arrows in my quiver, more strength in my armor. I can tell myself, we’ve been here before. And just as it comes it also goes.

I’m hung up lately on how people disappear into the ether of our lives, how they recede through walls and their imprint fades. It doesn’t seem at all like it should be. I do not like the idea that someone who has made such a massive alteration to my being is capable of fading out like this. It paints everything in a less valuable light. And I do not want to be that way.

I know that forgetting is part of the getting along. It’s part of the process and a process I know works if you work it. But there is some outcropping of me that doesn’t want to forget, even if the remembering is draining. There is place in which I go and can sit quiet with the sensations of the leather couch, and a hand in the morning, of cold air and car rides, of long afternoons, and of being high, of being kissed on the neck. Then, when the time comes I get up and leave that place, leave it all there, and get on with the process.